Daily Discovery: Myla Smith, “This Time I Mean It”

AMBITIONS: To write great songs, and help other young women to do the same. Someday soon, I’d love to start a songwriting camp for teen & pre-teen girls. That’s such a weird, confusing age, for girls especially. When I was a teenager, I felt like writing songs was my only safe outlet for self-expression. I want to give young women an outlet, provide them with a tool they can use to express themselves constructively and creatively, without fear of judgment.

TURN-OFFS: Video games, pastels, men who dye their hair, last names for first names, and all abbreviations of the word “husband.”

DREAM GIG: The Ryman, opening for The Weepies, or Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’s reunion tour. And since we’re dreaming, maybe Ray LaMontagne drops by as a surprise guest because he’s in town working on a new record, and he calls me out on stage to sing a duet with him. After the show, we all go grab a beer, and Robert Plant and I do an impromptu karaoke rendition of “Hungry Eyes” in Printer’s Alley.

TV ADDICTIONS: 30 Rock, Parks & Rec, Game of Thrones (dragons!)

CELEBRITY CRUSH: Raylan Givens, Tim Riggins, Ron Swanson

MY FAVORITE FORM OF EXERCISE: Dieting

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Ok, I’m totally giving myself away as a former school nerd here, but in college I was assigned to read “Amusing Ourselves To Death” by Neil Postman, and it was a total paradigm shift for me. It argues that the medium of communication, specifically entertainment media, fundamentally impacts the message we hear. I just found it fascinating.

I NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT: An Altoids can, emptied out, full of credit cards.

I WROTE THIS SONG: about addiction. I feel like “drugs” can look like a lot of different things, but they all have two things in common: they leave you empty, and they always come back for you. Everyone has something – or someone – that we know is no good for us, that we’ve said we were done with a million times, but we keep coming back to it (or them). I wanted to write a song that captured that worn-out feeling of wanting so much to be done with something that you can’t seem to say no to.